Rachel
by PoeticallyIrritating
Summary: Rachel Cuddy is thirteen. She is trying to survive middle school, boys, best friends, and two parents who love way too violently for any middle-schooler to accept. Now complete. AU thanks to the events of season 7, but when I wrote it it was reasonably plausible! (Sort of.)
1. Passionate

**I'm going to do something I should probably not do, and that is conform to the standard of submitting chapters with no idea of a story's direction and very little editing. (Everything will be proofread and spellchecked, of course, but I won't spend weeks or months on chapters like I usually do.) So I would actually love to hear plot suggestions in the comments, because this is just about all I've got so far. Enjoy!**

"Rachel," Mr. Remora said loudly. "Rachel!"

Rachel Cuddy looked up from the gossip magazine concealed not-so-discreetly behind her Algebra book. "Mm-hm?"

"Can you tell the class how to do example three?"

Rachel sifted through the papers on her desk to find the notebook with the neatly numbered list of examples worked out on it. "Um, it seems kind of self-explanatory to me. You just move the numbers around until you get the equation into the right format."

Mr. Remora raised his eyebrows at her, irritated. "And what is your answer?"

Rachel rolled her eyes. "Y equals two-X minus forty-three." After participating in an awkward staring contest with her teacher, she said deliberately, "I'm paying attention."

After deciding that he had no reason whatsoever to give her detention, no matter how much he wanted to, he moved on. Rachel returned to her magazine, reading an article about certain types of exotic fruits that could apparently be used to increase the sex drive. She had learned enough from her mother to know that the article was mostly nonsense, but she read it anyway. (She read everything, whether it was a magazine or a novel or a textbook, from cover to cover. Not like her father—he read everything backwards and upside down, and sometimes he skipped whole chapters in books.)

When the end-of-the-day buzzer sounded—a prolonged, high-pitched noise that Rachel felt was the kind of noise that should only be heard in Hell—she jumped up from her seat and was out the door first, shouldering the only hot pink backpack in the classroom.

Rachel hated the yellow bus, smelly from exhaust fumes and rotting bologna sandwiches under the seats. She always sat directly across from the stairs, sitting by the window with her backpack on the seat next to her to prevent anyone from sitting beside her. It wasn't that she didn't like people, really—just that there weren't any other eighth-graders who rode her bus, and the sixth- and seventh-graders were…

She searched for the word for a moment. _Stuck-up. _That was right. Eighth-graders were more grounded (at least sometimes.) They knew what they were doing, and they were preparing for high school next year, and they were smart enough to know how to manage their teachers. Some of them were, anyway. Rachel was.

It took thirty minutes for the bus to get to her stop, and then she had to walk two blocks home. Both her parents were doctors, and got home late, so she had the house to herself for about two hours after school. She never did much with the time—homework, computer, sourdough toast with peanut butter and tomato. (Both her parents called her crazy for that one.)

She was finishing up her last piece of sourdough when she heard a key rattle in the lock.

"Dad?" she called, as the hinges creaked. Her father usually came home first.

"No, Honey," her mother's voice called back. "I came home early to check on you. Dad's got a big case."

"Oh," said Rachel softly. She could hear the barely-restrained frustration in her mother's voice, but she was only disappointed. A big case meant more than nine-to-five hours: it meant her father getting home at all hours of the night and pacing when he couldn't sleep. Rachel could never sleep, either. Her schoolwork always suffered.

"How was your day, Rachel?"

Rachel shrugged. "Mr. Remora hates me, Maddie says I'm a slut because her boyfriend kissed me, and Alyssa still won't talk to me and I'm not even sure what I did. So basically a normal day."

"Mr. Remora…" Rachel's mother said distractedly. "He's—Science, right?"

Rachel shook her head. "Algebra."

"Why does he hate you?" She was busy, had already spread out a ton of paperwork from her bag onto the table and was sifting through it. She was a good multitasker, but Rachel had read somewhere that actually, _really, _multitasking, as in giving your full attention to two different things, was technically impossible. She could tell which task her mother wasn't paying as much attention to.

"I read magazines in his class 'cause it's so boring. I guess he gets offended or something, but I do all my work."

"That's good," her mother mumbled. "Maddie's boyfriend kissed you?" She stopped sifting through paperwork and was looking at Rachel completely, as if she had filed away Rachel's whole sentence without looking at it and had just pulled out the part about Maddie's boyfriend.

"Yeah," Rachel said, shrugging. "He's kind of a creep. I don't really know why she likes him."

Her mother shook her head slowly. "I don't know either. When did he kiss you?"

"He was at Maddie's house when I went over there last week, remember?"

"I didn't know he was going to be there. I thought it was just you and Maddie." She looked suspicious suddenly. "Who else was there?"

"A couple of people. Look, Mom, why do you care? It's not like I've never kissed a guy before."

Rachel's mother sighed. "You're growing up so fast," she said softly, brushing her own dark hair out of her eyes. "I feel—" She shook her head. "I feel like I haven't even gotten to know you. Like I'm missing your whole life."

"Trust me," Rachel said, rolling her eyes, "you see _plenty _of my life." She forced a laugh, and pulled an English book out of her backpack.

Her mother went back to her paperwork, which turned out to be a bunch of identical forms that said Employee Review at the top. Rachel peeked over the top of her school-issued paperback at her mother, who was sighing and making irritated noises, and brushing the little curls of dark hair that escaped her ponytail behind her ears.

Rachel would never have admitted it to either of her parents, but sometimes it bothered her that she didn't look like them. She knew the whole story of her existence—her mother had adopted her when she was a baby, and back then she had been with somebody else (somebody mysterious named Lucas whose only definition in her mind was that he was _not her father_.) She and Rachel's father had gotten together over a year after the adoption, and it had taken until she was five years old for them to get married. Rachel had some vague memories of the wedding, but mostly she remembered her father stumping in, leaning on his cane, waiting for the movers to bring in a few boxes of things. The biggest thing, the craziest thing, was the demolishing of the wall. They tore down the wall of their house to get her father's stupid piano inside.

Even though he was only married to her mother starting when she was five, he had always been Rachel's father. Her mother had been frantic, anxious about what her daughter should call the man she was with, and had told a very young Rachel that she could call him Greg if she wanted. But Rachel called him Dad.

And yet it bothered her that she didn't have her mother's square jaw or her father's vibrant blue eyes or any predilection toward medicine whatsoever. And it bothered her that she wasn't a genius like them—that she wasn't going to be all that great because she didn't contain any of her parents' brilliance. She wanted, ached, to be great.

Her mother made something for dinner. She had never been a particularly good cook, but she had gotten better over time. This particular thing was a kind of soup with beets, and in Rachel's opinion it looked too alarmingly like blood for ingestion. Her mother had already set out two bowls of it and poured them glasses of water when there was a knock at the door.

"Greg," Rachel's mother breathed thankfully. She got up from the table and opened the door, and as Rachel's father limped in, they embraced, lips on lips, for a full minute, while Rachel gagged and looked determinedly at her purple-red soup.

Until around fifth grade, when she had started noticing how her friends' parents acted, she had taken her own parents' kisses for granted. She assumed that everybody's parents kissed like that (like each of them held the life force for the other, like they didn't care if they crushed each other so long as they could keep holding on.) Now she was definitely not in favor of the way her parents kissed, because the way they did that strongly suggested sex, and she knew exactly how much she did _not _want to think about her parents doing _that._

Rachel squealed as an object appeared in midair, hurtling toward her. She caught it in between her palms. At the sudden feeling of something squishy and wet, she squealed again and dropped it.

_Plop! _it went, landing in the soup. Her father was laughing, in that borderline unpleasant way where she felt vaguely that he was laughing _at _her.

The object bobbed to the surface, and when she saw what it was, pink-stained and everything, she screeched. "_Dad!" _she cried. "An _eyeball?"_

Her mother looked frustrated, but not overly surprised. "What kind of eyeball?" she asked as they sat down at the table.

"Not human," Rachel begged. "Please say not human, _please_—"

He shrugged. "Okay. It's not human."

"_Dad!" _Rachel whined again. "Are you telling the truth?"

"Everybody lies," he intoned.

Rachel rolled her eyes. "What is that, like, your mantra? You say it _all the time. _What kind of eyeball is it?" She peered down at the bobbing object, still attached to the retina, stained bright pink by her soup.

"What does it matter what kind of eyeball? It's an eyeball, and it's in your soup. Either you eat it, or you don't."

Rachel nearly choked. "You think I'm going to _eat _this?" She sighed. "If I were, which I'm _not, _it _would _matter what kind of eyeball, because if it was a human eyeball, I would be guilty of cannibalism."

"Were," her mother corrected mildly. "If it _were _a human eyeball."

Rachel rolled her eyes again for the seventeenth time that day. (She made a point of counting.) "It's disgusting that you can both talk about this so calmly." She picked up her bowl of soup and dumped it down the sink, turning on the garbage disposal and feeling a bit sick thinking about the eyeball being chopped into pieces by the blade down there. "You should really come up with a new motto, by the way, Dad. Your 'everybody lies' one is getting boring."

"The truth," he said, with the air of someone imparting a great wisdom, "can never be boring."

"If that 'everybody lies' thing is the truth, then that means that _you _lie, too, which means that your thing is not true because you're a liar, but then 'everybody lies' is no longer true which means you don't lie…see? It doesn't work."

"No." He shook his head. "I'm not saying 'everybody lies all the time.' Just 'everybody lies.' You're mixing up your riddles."

Rachel sighed. "Either way, it's boring."

"You just don't like it because it gives me an excuse to snoop into your diary."

"Dad! You can't!" She panicked, but he shook his head.

"It would be stupid of me to tell you if I were going to do that."

Rachel relaxed.

"Or," he said suddenly, "maybe I'm just saying it so you'll _think_ I have no intention of snooping in your diary."

"Mom, _please,_" Rachel moaned, "make him stop it!"

"Greg," her mother said. "Stop antagonizing your daughter, please."

"But Mommy," he pouted.

Rachel groaned inwardly and got up to microwave some leftover macaroni and cheese. She hated when he did that.

"Behave in front of Rachel," Rachel's mother snapped, and hit him lightly in the shoulder.

"Does that mean I can _not _behave when I'm _not _in front of Rachel?" He dipped his spoon into the soup again and slurped it noisily, splattering purple droplets everywhere.

"Dad!" Rachel whined, as the microwave beeped. "You're so disgusting." She got up and pulled out the plate of steaming macaroni. Her mother looked slightly hurt as Rachel sat down with something that wasn't her soup, but Rachel couldn't bring herself to care when the sight of the purple mush made her immediately think of the possibly-human eyeball now sitting in fragments somewhere between their sink and the sewer.

Dinner, thank goodness, ended uneventfully. Rachel's father had to be discouraged from licking the bowl by her mother, who told him off in an exasperated-yet-pleased-that-_someone_-liked-her-cooking kind of way. Rachel disappeared to brush her teeth and change into pajamas. (They always ate dinner late.) Her parents were left in the living room, sitting close to each other on the couch.

That night was a record for the two of them: it took until 10:38 for Rachel to start hearing raised voices from the living room. She recorded the time in her carefully kept notebook, and beside it she wrote NEW RECORD, followed by seven or eight exclamation points.

Her stomach clenched, and she pulled out her cell phone to text the one good friend who was still speaking to her: Claudia.

_claudi. u up?_

She received a response almost instantly.

_always. whut u need?_

_parents yelling again. just need sum1 2 talk 2._

_whut they yellin abt?_

Rachel paused for a moment and crept to her bedroom door to listen.

First her mother's voice, tense and strained with fury. "Because _I_ let you get away with murder—and God knows, Greg, I never could deny you anything—you think you're invincible! At least you could tryto connect with your daughter."

A pause. Then her father, low and dangerous. "You hypocrite," he said softly, so softly that Rachel had to press her ear to the door to listen. "That doesn't mean a thing from the woman who _didn't feel a thing _for her new baby."

Rachel heard her mother gasp. "Who—?" but she stopped before she started. "Wilson," she whispered.

Her father kept going, cruelly. "No matter what you feel for her now, you'll always know what it was like in the beginning—that she was just a temporary solution to your damn insecurity."

Rachel couldn't breathe properly. She came away from the door, gasping a little as if her lungs weren't taking in air. She pressed her fingers to the pulse in her wrist, feeling the speed and force of it.

She checked her phone, and pulled up the most recent message from Claudia again.

_whut they yellin abt?_

Last week, Claudia's parents were fighting, and Rachel had asked her the same question.

_idk,_ Claudia had responded. _theres lots of swaering. i think its abt bread._

Bread, Rachel had thought. Some people's parents fought about bread.

So instead of saying something truthful, like _me _or _each other _or _hypocrisy, _she typed back:

_toilet paper i think…_

_o, _responded Claudia. _that suks._

Rachel didn't reply. She curled up under the covers, burying herself in a cocoon of blankets and bright, flowered sheets, and cried hot, messy tears into the scratchiest of her several blankets. She cried that she couldn't have normal parents who only kissed on the cheek and argued about groceries with curses that didn't mean anything. She cried that she couldn't at least fit in with them, at least be smart like them and have her mother's hair and nose and her father's eyes and chin.

But she wasn't like them and she never had been, so she just closed her eyes and pretended she wasn't hearing the passionate, halfway-stifled end to their argument through the wall between their bedroom and hers.


	2. Jake

**Hi, there! New chapter. It's way shorter, and in a completely different vein, but I think it should be all right. Also, I should point out that I'm aware that to be completely canon, this story would have to take place in about…2022? Ish? Something like that. Anyway, I'm ignoring that particular fact, because it would make everything horrendously complicated. So Rachel gets to text and her middle school gets to look very similar to what mine looked like, and we can ignore that cell phones will most likely look very different in twelve years. Thanks!**

Maddie's boyfriend Jake appeared suddenly in Rachel's peripherals while she was in the middle of taking a bite from her salami-and-cheese sandwich.

"Hi, Rachel," he said, before climbing conspicuously over the cafeteria table to where Maddie was sitting. "Hi, Maddie," he said, and clasped the hand she had resting on the table.

Maddie pulled away, making a face. "Don't touch me! We're broken up, remember?"

Jake scooted away from her, holding up his hands in the universal "don't blame me" gesture. "Yeah, sorta. Why is that again?"

Maddie glared. "Because you _kissed _my best friend."

Rachel choked on her sandwich, and tried to pass it off as a coughing spell. She always found it kind of disturbing when she found out that people thought of her as their best friend.

"Right," said Jake. "Aren't you still mad at Rachel?"

"Chicks before dicks," said Maddie gravely, and then giggled at the forbidden word. "I don't stay mad at Rachel."

"Bitch," Jake muttered as he left. And then, suddenly, he turned around. "If you need anything, Rachel—"

Maddie flipped a careless middle finger in his direction. He swore again, and stalked off.

"He's such a jackass," said Maddie.

Rachel raised her eyebrows and remarked, "Two days ago you were telling me how adorable it was when he forgot to brush his hair."

Maddie rolled her eyes and sighed. "Two days ago he hadn't kissed you."

"Right." Rachel sat slumped on the seat for a moment, staring unseeingly at her sandwich and milk. "I'm your best friend?"

Maddie shrugged. "Yeah. I mean, you're the only one who I know will never betray me." She knotted her eyebrows at Rachel. "What, I'm not your best friend?"

"I don't know." Rachel shifted uncomfortably. "I don't really—have best friends."

"Oh," Maddie said. She crushed her cardboard tater tots container in one hand. "I get it," she said, and left, mumbling about homework and their very persistent English teacher.

Rachel sat at the lunch table, alone now. Most of the people at the other tables had disappeared in the mass migration to the basketball courts that tended to happen about twenty minutes into lunch. She looked down at her sandwich and was surprised at how little she wanted to eat it.

It always felt so pathetic to sit alone, even if it was just because all your friends were coming from the far end of campus. Rachel sat, trying to reason it out the feelings behind it, before deciding that her mother's favorite medical student, James Stoddard, was right: psychology wasn't a real science.

So she just sat feeling pathetic for a few minutes, chewing on her sandwich without really tasting it.

"Rachel!"

She knew that voice, and she shouldn't have turned around but she did, and there he was. "Hey, Jake," she said tiredly. She knew she sounded a bit like her mother when she'd had a long day at work, but couldn't bring herself to fully complete the comparison.

"You okay?"

It seemed unlike Jake to say that. It caught her off guard. "Uh, kind of," she admitted, a half-truth.

"You don't really seem okay."

"No," Rachel said, "I'm not."

"No," Jake agreed.

He sat next to her on the bench, and they sat there in silence for a few minutes. Rachel felt less pathetic, if slightly more uncomfortable, and she sat wondering whether or not the unpleasant ache in her abdomen area was from bad salami or the fact that their kiss was replaying itself over and over in her mind.

"Hey, Rachel?"

"What?" It wasn't the most pleasant of tones in which she could have posed the question. She wasn't in a very forgiving mood.

"I'm sorry about that whole—kiss thing. You know? I didn't mean to screw everything up."

"Oh," Rachel said blankly. "Okay." She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "Shouldn't you apologize to Maddie too?"

"I guess." He didn't look too enthusiastic about the prospect.

"'Cause you know," Rachel warned, "You guys only broke up because you kissed me. If you say sorry you could probably get back together."

He shook his head. How creepy was it that he was staring her right in the eye like that? Except it wasn't actually that creepy. Not really. "I don't think that's going to happen."

Rachel blinked a few times to get rid of the feeling of being in a staring contest. "Why not? Do you think she won't forgive you or something?"

He shifted his feet under the table and looked down. "I just don't know if I still…like her like that."

Rachel looked up. "Really?"

"Yeah."

He was doing that creepy looking-straight-into-her-eyes thing again. Was he hinting at a double meaning, or…?

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked, and the moment the words left her mouth she realized how much it sounded like a line, like a sentence dropped carelessly from a TV actress' mouth.

His response was a hundred times worse, but she hardly noticed because of the way her stomach immediately started churching: "I like looking at you."

"Oh," was the only thing she could say.

And then he put his hands on her shoulders to hold her still while he kissed her again.


	3. DNA or Lack Thereof

**Chapter Three! Still a bit short and all. Involves a conversation between Rachel and her father. I'm on vacation until the end of the month, so updates won't come particularly quickly for the rest of the time, if they come at all. I've been trying to take some time for writing, but things are going to get crazy pretty soon. Bear with me. :)**

On Friday (which turned out to be four days after the fight and three days after the kiss), Rachel's father got home first for the first time all week.

"Hey," Rachel said, as he limped through the door, clutching a patient file in the hand that wasn't gripping his cane. His eyes were vacant, staring at the empty space near the hallway to the kitchen table. "_Hey,_" Rachel repeated.

"Rachel," he said, as if he hadn't seen her there. He came awkwardly into the kitchen and sat down across from her at the table.

"My day was fine, thanks," said Rachel, with semi-sarcastic condescension. "How was yours?"

He didn't answer, and Rachel crushed her bottom lip between her teeth to keep from crying. She'd wished so many times that she could understand what went on in his head.

He opened the file and bent over it, flipping through pages and running his finger down lists of hormone and protein levels. Rachel leaned forward to look at the symptoms listed on one of the pages. Sometimes, if he brought files home, she would read the symptoms and come up with amateur diagnoses stemming from her constant poring over the medical books and journals that always ended up lying on most of the furniture in the house. Usually he told her how very wrong she was, but then would admit that the diagnosis had been considered. He finally conceded, much to Rachel's delight, that she was no more idiotic than his team. (Rachel's mother had been on hand to translate the compliment.)

She almost opened her mouth to suggest bacterial meningitis, mostly because it had been stressed in the infectious disease book she'd been struggling through for several weeks now, but at that moment her father flipped hopelessly to the first page again, and she saw a red stamped word that she had missed before: _DECEASED. _

Oh.

"Dad?" Rachel said tentatively.

He didn't answer.

"_Dad_?" she repeated, more insistently.

When he still didn't indicate at all that he'd heard her, she reached out and snapped the file closed.

"Give that back," he said, but he wasn't whiny or angry, just exhausted.

"Talk to me," Rachel said. He looked at her, hopeless, tired.

"What?"

"You never get a diagnosis by staring at a file. And I need to talk to you."

"Okay," he said blankly. "How was school?"

Rachel squinted at him. "You never ask me about school."

"Lisa says I should."

"Okay. School was fine. My math teacher hates me."

"Oh," said Rachel's father. "Why?" he asked, after a pause.

Rachel shook her head. "I don't know. That's not what I want to talk about."

He pushed the file away with an exaggerated sigh. "What do you want to talk about?"

"Well…" She dragged out the L for ages—"Wel-l-l-l-l…"

"What?" snapped her father, irritated. Rachel looked down uncomfortably, and her father, very quietly, said, "Ha."

She looked up, alarmed. He knew something.

"What's his name?" he asked.

"No—" Rachel started to say.

Her father laughed, in that awful way he had of laughing at people. "Shut up," he said. "You were going to tell me anyway. I'd say it's been…less than a week. Probably three or four days. And…" He tapped his fingers on the table for a moment. "Friend's ex-boyfriend."

Rachel groaned. "I hate you!" She wasn't sure if she meant it or not. "How do you know _everything_?"

"You're thirteen, so everything you want to talk about has to do with boys. Hormones going _wild._" He leered at her.

Rachel cringed. "_Dad! _You're so gross!"

"Three or four days—you're a daddy's girl." He grinned. He looked almost proud, Rachel thought. "You can't keep secrets from me for longer than that. And the friend's ex-boyfriend—" He made an exaggerated show of pinching his nose. "You wear the stench of guilt."

Rachel rolled her eyes, sighing. "You're right."

"I'm always right." He leered again. "Which friend, by the way?"

"Maddie," Rachel muttered, looking down at her knees under the table. "His name is Jake."

"How many days?"

Rachel glared at him across the table. "Three days. You know how annoying it is when you Sherlock Holmes everything like that? It _sucks._"

"You read Sherlock Holmes?"

Rachel rolled her eyes. "What are you, impressed?"

"I'm not impressed by anything you do. You're my kid." He drew himself up. "You're supposed to be a genius."

Rachel rolled her eyes again. (Thirteenth time that day.) "In case you haven't noticed, I don't have any of your actual DNA."

"Well, you know"—he jumped up suddenly from his chair and limped to the coffee maker—"DNA isn't everything. There are some psychologists who think it doesn't affect behavior at all."

Rachel turned to look at her father. He was bending down awkwardly to get a clean coffee mug from the dishwasher. "You hate psychologists."

"Everybody hates psychologists," he said. Rachel couldn't tell if he was agreeing with her or not. He rose triumphantly with a mug and placed it on the counter before refilling the coffee maker with water. "You're basically"—he made a face—"not allowed to study science without hating psychologists. But they're usually right."

Rachel stared. "But that DNA thing doesn't make any sense."

Her father limped back to the table, leaving his mug waiting for the coffee maker to finish. "You're right. Psychologists are idiots." Rachel laughed. Her father tapped his feet on the floor for a moment. "No, behavior is…"

He stopped midsentence, stood up suddenly, and then sat down again. "Damn," he whispered.

Rachel slumped in her seat, sliding forward until her feet touched the legs of the chair opposite her. (His chair.) "You got it, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

He never said everything. Most people let things out at least a little bit, talked to their friends or their spouses or _somebody. _But Rachel's father had all this ridiculous subtext in his speech that only Rachel (and probably her mother) could even try to understand.

In this case it was, _Sure, I got it. But I'm too late and the patient's dead and nothing matters anymore. _Because that was how it always was for him after a patient died—died because he didn't solve the puzzle, and one of the glories of solving the puzzle was doing it within the time limit. (That was why he cared about patient lives—they represented the time limit for him. And there was little interest—only a vague sense of depressing closure—to solving the puzzle when the game was over.)

Rachel had to suppress an overwhelming urge to hug him. Greg House didn't _hug._

"Dad?" she asked softly.

He looked up. His eyes were so hopeless, but she couldn't help herself.

"Would you love me more if—you know—if I was really your kid?"

"No."

It was the answer she had been looking for, but when it came, it was all so wrong. _That wasn't what I meant! _she wanted to cry. But now the subtext was all she could hear. _I could never really love you._


	4. Parallels

**Here we are. New chapter. It's kind of short, and I'm sorry for the ridiculously long wait! It's possible the next chapter will be up more quickly, but I'm going on vacation again and can't promise anything. Enjoy!**

On Monday, a few minutes before the first-period bell, Jake sidled up to Rachel and slid his adept arm around her waist.

Rachel chose to ignore the fact that his arm was made adept at that particular mechanical action by lots of practice with lots of other girls, and instead allowed herself to enjoy the feeling of her heart thudding more quickly in her chest.

The girl she had been talking to, Jessica, choked on her mouthful of stale potato chips. (She had offered some to Rachel, but Rachel considered it obscene to eat chips so early in the morning and had politely refused.) Jessica's eyebrows rose so high that they disappeared behind her bangs. "Are you two, like—together?"

Jake and Rachel smiled the knowing smile of revoltingly happy newlyweds. Rachel giggled, "Yeah," and Jake navigated the same word through his grin, and Rachel _liked, _really _liked _the way he pulled her protectively close to him as he answered.

Jessica's eyebrows stayed up. "What about Maddie?"

"Who?" Jake said, with another knowing smile. He grinned at Rachel and squeezed her hand. She smiled back.

Jessica's eyebrows returned to their normal position, but she shook her head. "If I was Maddie, I'd be pissed."

Rachel let out a false-annoyed sigh as Jessica turned away, but she gripped Jake's hand a little more tightly. "I never thought about Maddie," she whispered to Jake. "Is that really horrible of me?"

Jake shrugged. "It's not our problem that I chose you instead of her."

"Right," said Rachel, and as the bell rang, she let go of his hand and vaulted over a row of seats to get into her own before it finished buzzing.

When Rachel got home from school, her mother was already there.

"Aren't you a little late?"

Rachel stared for a moment. "My day was fine, thanks," she finally said, more sarcastically than she had intended. "What about yours?"

Her mother looked confused. "Um—fine. Why are you home so late?"

"I got stuck at the bus stop. My backpack got stuck in a fence, and I had to get someone to help me get it off."

Rachel's mother planted her hands on her hips in a way that clearly indicated she knew more than she was letting on.

Rachel groaned. "What did Dad tell you?"

"Jake?" said her mother. "Maddie's boyfriend Jake?"

"Maddie's _ex-_boyfriend," Rachel corrected. "That's kind of an important difference."

"Rachel," her mother said sharply. "Focus."

"On what? You? I was making the conversation more accurate. I'm paying total, complete, entire attention to you."

"Rachel, did you ever stop to think how this might be making Maddie feel?"

Rachel sighed. "Look, we're not in first grade anymore. Maddie can take care of herself." She tried to remember what Jake had said earlier. "It's not my problem that Jake chose me."

"I bet Maddie feels pretty hurt."

"Mom, it's not my problem." Why wouldn't she understand? "It's like you don't even know how things work. I'm not a little kid. Like, poor Maddie, boo-hoo, her _feelings _are hurt. We're _thirteen. _That's not how we do things anymore. She gets upset, she gets over it, whatever. I can put my boyfriend over Maddie." She paused. "It's not like you don't put Dad above everything else."

Rachel's mother's eyes pressed closed for a fraction of a second as she gathered her thoughts. "That's not fair," she said softly. "You know that that's different—"

"How, Mom? How is it any different?" She could feel herself going on the offensive, preparing for a fight. Her pulse sped up, blood pounding through her veins at a steady, rapid _surge-surge-surge. _"You always put Dad over me."

"Rachel—" Her mother's voice was cracking, but Rachel couldn't bring herself to stop.

"So why's it different? 'Cause he's your husband? That's so not fair. It's not like he was always your husband."

"Rachel." Her mother had pulled herself together, and gone from emotional to executive. Rachel knew this, the firm, no-nonsense, hospital administrator voice that her mother used at work. "We can talk about Jake, or we can talk about your dad, but I won't do both at once."

"Because you know I'm right!" It sounded feeble, somehow, so Rachel sighed. "I never wanted to talk about either one."

"We can stop. Just—think about Maddie." She headed towards her paperwork, but stopped before she got there. "I love you, Rachel."

Rachel muttered a noncommittal "Mm-hm" and went to thud her backpack onto her bedroom floor.


	5. Interrupted Confessions

**I know, I know. Two months. It's a new all-time low. Or high, depending on how you're counting. In my defense, I had to finish my summer homework, and then school started. So I've been busy learning about European history, finishing essays, programming in Java, and sitting through ages of mindless algebra review. In any case, I'm ever so dreadfully sorry. But I thought the last chapter was a little substandard, so I wanted to spend a bit more time on this one.**

Rachel tried not to think about Maddie. She tried as hard as she possibly could _not _to listen to her mother's advice, but as soon as she had started trying not to think about Maddie, she was seeing her everywhere. It wasn't as if Maddie had popped up in new classes or anything—Rachel had always _known _that she was in class with Maddie for History and Science, but when Mrs. Romero started droning about acids and bases and drawing farm animals on the board as if she was implementing a half-remembered teaching technique, Maddie appeared suddenly in Rachel's vision, and Rachel would watch her doodling on her binder before remembering that they weren't speaking. Sometimes she would even write a note on a scrap of lined paper to shove towards her before she remembered. It was easier to remember in History, where Jake sat just diagonal to her and they would squeeze hands when Mrs. Finley turned to write something on the board. But then it was almost worse, because Maddie sat near them too, and every once in a while she would see them hold hands. Depending on the day, she would glare or smash a pencil down viciously onto her desk. She cried once, and Rachel squeezed Jake's hand harder, anxious, digging her nails into his palm until he whispered, "Shit," and shook her off.

But Rachel saw Maddie so often at break or lunch that she started to think that Maddie was doing it on purpose, trying to inspire guilt just by her presence.

Well, it did work. For two weeks she managed to ignore it, avoiding the places where crowds gathered and looking determinedly away in class. But on Friday in the second week, Maddie appeared out of nowhere in the cafeteria. She stared at Rachel, at Rachel and Jake sitting with their arms twined at a table, and she looked for just a moment before she turned away.

"Jake?" said Rachel softly. "I have something to take care of."

"Okay," he said—uncertain, suspicious, but willing to wait. So Rachel stood up and ran across the room to catch up with Maddie pushing open one of the doors.

"Maddie!"

Maddie turned around. When she saw Rachel, she stepped outside and let the door slam shut behind her.

Rachel pushed the door open and followed. "Maddie!"

She caught up with her near the basketball courts, and Maddie stopped, breathing hard. "What?" she asked. It was not an open-for-discussion "what." It was a clear leave-me-alone-and-never-speak-to-me-again "what," but Rachel figured her questionable P.E. abilities couldn't take more than one high-speed chase per year.

"We should—talk," Rachel gasped.

"You just figured that out?"

"Just let me—breathe—okay?"

Maddie rolled her eyes. Rachel noticed that even with her chest burning, and wondered if her own eye-rolling was part of a school-wide epidemic.

"I'm—" She stopped to take a breath and push her hair behind her ears, and then started again. "I'm sorry about Jake," she said, and it came out too fast because she'd been rehearsing it in her head and because she was afraid to take too long on one sentence in case she ran out of breath before it was over.

"I can tell," Maddie snapped. "So, _so _sorry."

"Maddie, I really am; I didn't mean—" Rachel sighed. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean for things to happen like this—Well, I didn't really mean for things to happen at all, they just did, and—well, I really kind of was hoping that you'd forgive me and things would"—she paused for breath again—"go back to normal and stuff."

Maddie smiled with all her teeth, even the lower ones with the crooked blue braces, and for a minute Rachel thought things would be okay. But then she saw the bitterness in the smile. "I liked normal," said Maddie.

"Me, too," Rachel said tentatively. "Do you think we could—?"

But she was speaking too softly and Maddie interrupted. "I liked the kind of normal where I was with Jake and you weren't."

Then Rachel did something that she knew was a bad idea. She knew because it was what her father did when he argued, and he knew best how to anger and alienate people. But she also knew it would get her out of this situation. It would give her the last word.

When her father argued, he punched holes in the other person's arguments—bam, bam, bam, no time for apologies—preferably while making them insecure at the same time. So that was what Rachel did.

"What makes you think that Jake would be with you if he wasn't with me?"

It worked well. Maddie was shocked into silence.

"Think about it," Rachel said, and she turned to go while Maddie stood there staring.

When she got home (probably smelling like cafeteria food and bus fumes), Rachel followed her customary routine—homework, computer, sourdough/peanut butter/tomato. Her mother didn't arrive before seven.

"Why are you home late?"

She dumped a stack of paperwork on the dining room table and collapsed in a chair before answering. "Your dad has an—unstable patient. Starts seizing whenever they try to do a procedure."

"Is the patient—what's the word—epileptic?"

"No. They don't know. They had to do a brain biopsy, and for some reason Greg felt like he didn't need to supervise—"

"Doesn't Dad have four doctors working for him again?" Rachel interrupted. "Why does _he _need to supervise?"

"Because he sees things that they don't." Her mother pinched her eyes shut as if she were in pain. "I'm sorry, Rachel. You shouldn't be worrying about this. I shouldn't be—" But she gave up halfway through the sentence, and fell back again on "I'm sorry."

They sat there in silence for a while. Rachel started to consider getting up to make macaroni and cheese—the only thing she could make aside from toast—because it was becoming clear that neither of her parents would be making dinner. Maybe her mother's exhaustion was catching, however, because she was starting to feel like the walk to the kitchen cupboard was impossibly long and treacherous. So they sat.

"I talked to Maddie today," Rachel said finally.

Her mother didn't answer.

"If it matters," she added. "People dying. I get it. My problems aren't much next to that guy's problems."

Her mother sighed. "Rachel, don't do this to me."

"Do what?"

"It's not like I don't feel guilty enough already."

"Then listen to me," Rachel said softly.

Her mother started to say something, but the door creaked open and her father clunked in, the thumps of his cane unsteady. "Is it just me, or do patients get more idiotic every year?" he called.

Rachel and her mother both looked up at him. "Greg," her mother breathed. "What happened?"

He thumped his cane on the floor in an expression of frustration. "Patient apparently forgot about his three-generation history of heart problems."

"How does that even relate to seizures?" Rachel asked, in spite of herself, in spite of her irritation at having her conversation interrupted and in spite of her inability to understand most of what he said about work.

"Trust me, it does," said her father, smirking. Every bit of him screamed "condescending." Rachel, however, held back for fear of misunderstanding his explanation.

"So he's okay?" her mother asked.

"Well, I'm not looking worried…but then again, when do I ever worry about patients?" He grinned. "Maybe it's all a big lie."

But Rachel could _feel _his relief—she could see it in the slight straightening in his posture, a little less reliance on his cane. When she was little, four or five maybe, he used to come home after he had solved a case, pick her up, and spin her around. He would spin too fast, and she would shriek wildly, panicking as her legs swung alarmingly close to the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling. She learned to recognize his manner when he came home with a mystery solved, and she would run to be picked up. She could tell. But one day he picked her up and then gasped and abruptly dropped her on the carpet. Rachel cried, her mother screamed, and her father leaned heavily on his cane, clutched his thigh, and swore.

He didn't pick her up after that. It hurt too much. She would run to him when he came home like that, and he would hold out his cane and prod her in the chest, stopping her before she could reach him. She would cry, and her mother would hold her while he paced anxiously. He had lost a little of the pleasure of coming home. A crippled hero was to be pitied, not exulted, so he refused exultation.

Rachel's father disappeared into the bedroom, and her mother looked after him helplessly. Rachel had to fight a sudden urge to cry.

"Tell me about Maddie," said her mother shakily.

Rachel pressed her lips together. "I don't think I want to anymore," she said, and turned away.

"Rachel!"

But Rachel kept walking. She still wanted to cry, but she managed to keep control. It was a skill she had developed.


	6. The Evolutionary Purpose of Guilt

**All right. It's really short. I know it's really short, and it's been a long time, and I'm sorry! But what that means is I've already written a lot of the next chapter, and it should be up within the week. Enjoy! (As a side note, I really love writing these two.)**

"Dad?"

Rachel's father was sitting on the couch in the living room, in a state of lessened pain due to the five or six ibuprofen he had just taken. It was late morning on Sunday, and Rachel's face was contorted in an expression of anxiety, or inner conflict, or _something _that he obviously picked up on, because he said, "Good morning, Sunshine," and turned to point a deliberately quizzical look at her.

"Hi. Dad, I know you don't really do, like, ethics and stuff…" She paused. "I mean—"

"You're feeling guilty again."

Rachel shifted her weight uncomfortably and nodded, looking at the floor. "Is it—I mean, am I—what I'm doing, what we're doing—me and Jake, I mean, or Jake and me, or whatever—is it wrong?"

She waited. He looked like he was gathering his thoughts or something. She waited for him to say "no," to tell her that she was just fine, that Maddie would get over it and Jake was more important. But that seemed like an answer that wouldn't take the amount of thought he was putting into his answer.

"Why do you feel guilty?" he asked finally.

Rachel was caught off guard, still playing that easy answer in her head. "What do you mean, why?"

"Why. Three letters. I'm pretty sure that's been covered in school already." He grinned. "I bet you can even spell it."

"Dad, you know that's not what I meant. Your question doesn't make sense."

"We feel everything for a reason, right? We evolve feelings to help us deal with situations."

Rachel the ever-skeptical asked, "Like what?"

"Like…" He paused. "The feeling of awkwardness tells us not to talk about things. But I've told that joke before," he added quickly, stopping Rachel in mid-half-hearted giggle. "It's not fun anymore."

"I think this is the opposite of a pep talk, Dad. You're encouraging me not to talk about things."

"Shut up. Bad example. Listen… A mother develops a feeling of love toward her children, so she takes care of them, so the species can advance. You follow?"

"Yeah. It's depressing." Rachel looked at him. "What's the point?"

"So guilt is a pretty serious emotion. More powerful than awkwardness, by the way, so you still have to talk about things. Unfortunately. Figure out what its purpose is. Why do you feel guilty?"

Rachel groaned. "What is this, like homework? This is stupid. Can't you just tell me the evolutionary purpose of guilt, or whatever?"

"No."

Rachel clenched her fists irritatedly. "Why not?"

"Because that would be no fun," he said. And he grinned.


	7. Taken by Surprise

**As promised! Here you are—the fastest update in just about forever. ;)**

Rachel couldn't focus properly. During morning break, Jake snuck up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, and she screamed in surprise and then pulled away.

"What?" he asked, shaking his hair out of his eyes.

"Sorry," Rachel muttered. "I've just been…thinking. I'm kind of—I'm sorry. I just need to think about some stuff. Could you maybe just let me do that for a while?"

"Jeez," said Jake, exasperation with a hint of derisive laughter. "Sure. Whatever." He walked away, and Rachel felt as if she had been punched in the stomach.

In English, after trying to think about guilt, pounding her closed fist rhythmically against her head, she gave up. Her father's mind games were less pertinent than Jake being angry, and by the time she got to fifth-period History, Rachel had positively gone to pieces. So when Mrs. Finley started discussing the specifics of the Revolutionary War, she leaned across the walkway between her desk and Jake's.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I didn't mean to be mean or anything. I'm just…" She searched for an appropriate word. "…confused. I really just needed to think, and it wasn't"—she hesitated—"_really_ about us."

Jake shrugged. "Whatever." He turned to the front again and lay his head down on his desk.

There was a flutter of panic in the pit of Rachel's stomach. Nobody was that quick to forgive. And that wasn't really forgiveness, anyway; it was more…evasion. Frantically seeking absolution, she whispered, "Do you want to come over after school?"

"Whatever," said Jake again. "Sure."

"Okay," said Rachel uneasily. "Meet me at the bus stop?"

"Sure."

She still had to spend the rest of the day calming herself down, reminding herself that things were okay now and he wasn't mad anymore. And when they met and climbed onto the sticky, smelly bus, already loaded with shrieking elementary-schoolers, she couldn't stop the flutter of anxiety that took up residence in the pit of her stomach.

Jake rode in the seat next to her, so she had to balance her backpack awkwardly on her knees—it wouldn't fit in the space between her legs and the seat in front.

"Are your parents going to be home?"

"No," said Rachel, with a bit of unnecessary violence in her tone. She hadn't considered until that moment what kind of a disaster it would be if Jake met her parents. "They're doctors," she added. "So they get home kind of late."

"Jeez," said Jake. "That's why you're so smart."

Rachel couldn't really think of an acceptable response to that, so she fished her iPod out of her pants pocket and offered Jake one of the headphones. He scoffed, and she took it back rather quickly, shoving both of them into her ears instead.

She sank into a world involving mostly her music and the back of the bus driver's head, until Jake broke in by reaching for her hand and tracing circles on her palm with the tips of his fingers. She held still, stiff, unsure of what she was supposed to be doing.

By the time they reached her stop, the bus was nearly empty. They jumped down the stairs together and walked, sweaty palms clasped together, until they reached Rachel's house.

"Shit," he said quietly. He sounded disappointed.

"What?"

"It's a lot nicer than my house."

"What's your house like?" Rachel asked, with a twinge of pity.

He kissed the corner of her mouth. "Let's go inside."

Rachel unlocked the door. She didn't understand why her heart was pounding, but she tried her best to ignore it.

"Do you want something?" she asked awkwardly, twisting her hands and shoving them in her pockets and then taking them out again to curl some stray hairs behind her ear. "Like, something to drink or eat or something?"

"No," said Jake.

Rachel bit her lip. "So what do you want to do, then?"

"Whatever," he said, leaving Rachel with a feeling of being tested. She had to choose an activity of his liking, or else the buzzer goes off, the lights flash, and the game is over. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

Jake sat on the couch, and Rachel sat with him. After a moment of indecision, she turned and kissed him, realizing as she did that it was the first time she had initiated a kiss. She had almost expected Jake to be indignant, but he kept kissing. And kissing, and kissing…

It was the longest kiss she had ever had, and it was starting to feel slimy and weird and Jake's hands started to reach for her and they were up under her shirt and before she could even start to consider how she felt about this new development the door had banged open and Jake had jumped a foot away and her father was standing there looking murderous.

"Out," he said, low and dangerous, and Jake leapt up from the couch as if burned and scrambled out the door. Rachel had only a moment to wonder how exactly he was getting home before she saw her father preparing for what was sure to be the lecture of the millennium.

"You were supposed to be thinking about guilt."

Rachel stared. It took her a minute to figure out what he was talking about. "What? What does that have to do with—?"

"Everything," he interrupted.

"But what about this? What about today?"

"Just think about it," he said. "Tell me when you've figured it out."

"But—"

"I'm taking a bath," he said, and walked away. He was leaning more heavily on his cane than usual.

Rachel looked out the window and saw Jake trudging down the street, his backpack bouncing a little with every step. She wanted to go and help him, but she remembered the look on her father's face. She sat down heavily, kicking the chair legs with her heels and resisting the introspection that her father demanded.

**So, which is better: short chapters and fast updates, or long chapters with updates farther apart? Let me know.**


	8. A Serial Addict with Intimacy Issues

**All right. So, there's a bit of a hiatus coming up. NaNoWriMo puts all of my other writing activities on hold, so all work on this will be halted until December first, which means there probably won't be another chapter for about a month and a half. I'm sorry! **

Rachel had thought she had cured herself of listening at her bedroom door. But, lying awake listening to her parents argue, she grew frustrated with hearing noise but no words. She got up and seated herself at the door, pulling her knees up to her chest and pressing her ear against the wood.

"Trust me, Lisa," her father was saying softly. "I know what I'm doing."

"You?" Rachel could hear the hysteria in her mother's voice. "You don't know anything about people! Sure, you can make all the witty generalizations you want, but you don't know the first thing about _dealing _with people. You don't know what you're doing."

"I've helped you raise a child." Again his voice was soft, like it always was when he tried to be sincere. "I'm getting better. Rachel will understand, soon. She's not the kind of kid you can yell at to get a point across."

"But, Greg—"

"Trust me," he interrupted, slow and emphatic. "Please trust me."

"I guess—" her mother began haltingly. "I'm sorry," she began again. "I know sometimes I don't give you enough credit, sometimes I pretend it's just me raising her and not both of us, because—" Her voice started to crack. "—because I was alone for so long and I was so afraid that there would never be anybody…"

"Sh…" The sound came so softly from her father's lips that Rachel wasn't even sure that she'd heard it, but she heard tears muffled by what was likely a leather jacket.

"And when I see Rachel with these boys, I get scared…that she'll be like me."

A soft chorus of "you're perfect you're wonderful don't ever change don't ever change."

"And I fell in love with a serial addict with intimacy issues, so—" She started to giggle, but the laughter was tempered by her tears.

Rachel drew away. She went back to bed, but couldn't sleep.

**I know, it's super short. Humor me, would you? Short chapters are fun. (Also, I'm impossibly busy, so that might have something to do with it.) I will return in November!**


	9. Moral

**And I'm back! NaNoWriMo is over (and I have triumphed, so there.) Chapter nine is here. Also, I apologize for the note on the last chapter, in which I said that I would return in November. I meant December. And here I am! Nice how that works out. Anyhow, enjoy! And I really, really promise I'll wrap up all the things you guys have been bringing up in the comments. Really. Just not today.**

GUILT, Rachel wrote on the back of her history worksheet. She was supposed to be…actually, she wasn't sure what she was supposed to be doing. Probably review questions or something like that. She was fairly certain that she had entirely missed the last five battles of whichever war they were studying. She started to draw one of those stupid word maps that her fourth-grade teacher was obsessed with—an inane web of vaguely related words and definitions and associations—but she stopped.

"Why can't he just be a normal dad?" she whispered into the palm of her hand, which smelled like potato chips and hand sanitizer. "Couldn't he have just yelled?" She crumpled up her paper.

"Are you finished, Rachel?" Mrs. Finley asked, appearing suddenly and alarmingly at Rachel's left shoulder. She was a skinny, gangly sort of woman who had never quite grown into her limbs, and her wild hair and split ends were the source of endless derisive comments from the perfect-haired girls in the corners of the room.

"No," said Rachel. She raised her eyes slowly. "I made a mistake. I need a new paper."

"You know, I always ask that students do their classwork in pencil, but they never liiiisten…" Mrs. Finley singsonged.

"I'm sorry," Rachel muttered. She glanced over at Jake, who was staring at his paper. He looked as if he had been paying even less attention than Rachel had in the past few weeks. Rachel had apologized for her father's idiocy, and generally tried to ignore the whole incident as much as possible.

She spread out her paper again and stared at the word, black and spiky, on the back. _If feelings are trying to tell us something, then what does guilt tell me? _It sounded stupid even in her head. It was all stupid. Why couldn't he just tell her what guilt meant and get this whole nonsense over with?

But Greg House dealt only in puzzles.

Mrs. Finley returned with the new worksheet, but Rachel hardly looked at it. She kept staring at the word on the page. "Guilt," she whispered to herself, hunched over and looking almost unseeing at the paper. "Guiltguiltguiltguilt," she murmured ,until the word had lost all meaning and she didn't know anymore what she was saying.

She finally wrote a list under the word.

_Murder_

_Betrayal_

_Lying_

Because those were the kinds of things that people felt guilty about, right? She wondered if her father had messed up her moral compass, like a magnet screwing with the needle until it stopped pointing north.

"Damn," Rachel whispered, and she wondered if this was what an epiphany felt like. "Damn," she repeated.

"How's the worksheet going, Rachel?" asked Mrs. Finley, popping up out of nowhere.

Rachel nearly shouted. "Fine," she said. Her voice shook slightly after being startled. "The Civil War was pretty crazy," she added brightly.

"Wasn't it?" said Mrs. Finley dreamily, and walked away.

When Rachel got home, her father wasn't there. This was normal, but she found herself more impatient than usual. She didn't make any of her awful snacks, and she didn't do her homework. She turned on the TV and watched for two long hours, tapping her fingers anxiously on her thigh, until finally the door swung open and her father arrived home.

"Dad!" She jumped up.

"Well hello, Little Miss Sunshine," he said, looking at her warily. "Why so sunny?"

"I figured it out."

"Did you?" he said, in such a way that Rachel couldn't be sure whether he'd understood or not.

"Guilt," she said urgently. "It means you've done something wrong."

He paused, and turned and squinted at her for a very long time. "Close enough," he said, and flashed a grin.

"Wait—" He had already started to walk away. "Wait, Dad! What do you mean, close enough?"

"Well, it's a little moral for my taste, but you've got the gist," he said. "Now do the deed."

She blinked at him. "What?"

He stuck out his tongue at her. Rachel closed her eyes, hoping that she could prevent the image of her father being a child (one too many times) from being imprinted on the backs of her eyelids, but it was unlikely. "You _know_ what," he said. "Go. Do."

"Why don't you ever just _say _anything?" she called after him as he disappeared into the back bedroom.

But she knew. She called Jake and gave him a stupid excuse. Maybe she didn't even give a reason. If she did, it wasn't a very good one or she would have remembered it. But she did say "You probably shouldn't be my boyfriend anymore," because she was hoping that would be less cliché than the other things she had been considering.

"We can't see each other anymore."

"This is wrong."

"I'm sorry."

She might have had a hard time selling that last one.


	10. Killjoy

**Chapter Ten. Merry Christmas! I don't think I'm screwing up the timeline too much by making it Christmas in this chapter. I hope I didn't make any vague references as to season earlier. Honestly, I don't care all that much. We can have a six-month winter if I say so, right? I'm in a Christmassy mood. (I can't believe spellcheck doesn't mind "Christmassy.")**

Rachel did a good job of ignoring Jake over the next few weeks. A lot of that had to do with his ignoring her, so it all worked out fairly well. Maddie had an impressive change of heart as soon as word reached her that Rachel had broken up with Jake, and Rachel no longer had to worry about where to sit at lunch. She sat with Maddie for a few days, and eventually Claudia joined them, after confessing that she had been feeling neglected, what with all the drama. Rachel mumbled an apology to both of them and tried to relax. Still, she was relieved when Christmas break came.

The end of the first semester came with a dance, which was held after the last day of school. Rachel usually went to dances, but this one she didn't feel up for—especially with Maddie talking nonstop about Jake and his possible date—so she stayed home.

Her father was finishing up a case, and so her mother got home earlier. Her mother left a little early, actually, with time before dinner. Rachel sat in the big gray chair in the library corner of the living room, spending a few moments trying to feel like her father. He was the one who sat in that chair. She clutched her thigh and tried to imitate his usual sarcastic look, but she didn't do a very good job.

"Are you okay?" asked her mother, genuinely concerned at Rachel's contorted face.

"Fine," said Rachel, relaxing her hand and face with a frustrated sigh. She rearranged herself so her legs were draped over the arm of the chair. "Is Aunt Julia coming for Christmas?"

"Not this year," said her mother, sitting across from Rachel in a more feminine burgundy chair. Rachel preferred hers. "She and Grandma are going to some spa…lake…retreat. Or something."

"What's a spa lake retreat?" Rachel asked, with a bit of excess sarcasm.

"Nothing, Rachel—I don't know. Some retreat. Julia won tickets on the radio."

"So she asked her _mom _to go with her? Doesn't she have some boyfriend or something?"

Her mother squinted. "I think they broke up."

"Again?" Rachel said.

Her mother laughed and nodded, before suddenly sobering—probably realizing (rightly) that she had no right whatsoever to judge other people's relationships.

"So who's coming?"

"Well, Lucinda and her husband are staying with his parents, so I think we're on our own for Christmas this year."

"Really?" asked Rachel, in a tone of voice that made her mother look up.

"What's wrong with that?"

Rachel shrugged. "We're on our own all the time. It's like we live in this island where nobody ever touches us."

Her mother nodded. "I know. But it could be fun, right?"

Rachel made an unconvinced noise.

"We can decorate! Why don't we do that today?"

Rachel looked at her mother for a minute, a little skeptical, before getting up out of her father's chair and following her mother into the garage.

Her parents were a bit divided when it came to Christmas. Her mother, though hardly religious, got very involved in the decorating part. She always had an enormous tree, and her Christmas decorations barely fit in five boxes. She had two whole boxes just full of lights, and two more of tree ornaments. The outside of the house generally looked like an explosion to tiny lights when she was done with it.

Her father, on the other hand, grumbled a lot around Christmas time. He refused to decorate, muttered a lot about first-century history, and gave them both dark looks. He said that Rachel's mother hadn't cared much about Christmas until Rachel got to be a bit older and fell completely in love with Christmas as a five-year-old. Since then, her mother had been in love with it, too. Her father just grumbled more. The only way he (grudgingly) participated in the holiday was with piano playing and scarce gift-giving.

There were about a hundred curved brass hooks speared into the wooden siding of the house, and Rachel and her mother used them all. There were, in all, seventeen strings of lights used on the outside of the house (including the back) and five tacky figurines lit up in the yard. Rachel counted everything, and reported to her mother that two hundred lights on each string meant 3400 little lights that they were supplying electricity for, not including the figurines and in a few days the lights on the tree, and how exactly did she pay their December electric bill every year?

Her mother threw a plush reindeer at her and called her a killjoy and laughed.

By the time her father got home at nine, they had already eaten, and were sitting at the kitchen table talking over their empty bowls. They heard him shuffling at the front door, fiddling with the key, and then the door swung open and he was singing, gruffly, "God rest ye merry, hypocrites…" and then he trailed off and looked up at them with an alarming set of Bambi eyes. "Merry Christmas," he said brightly. "What's for dinner?"

Rachel's mother looked at him with a skeptical, raised-eyebrows kind of look, as if she were saying, "You don't really think I didn't hear that, do you?"

But he sat down without acknowledging her and smiled as pleasantly as he possibly could. "Is that pork? You're a bad Jew." He winked. "Don't worry. I won't tell."

Rachel's mother served him with a dark look that gave way, almost instantly, to a giggle. "You're such an ass."

**So, there is a possibility that the next chapter will be the last. If there's anything I haven't wrapped up, please let me know! I think it will take place on Christmas, so if I can't get it up tomorrow (today, technically speaking) then I definitely will the day after. Thank you guys so much for reading! I am so grateful for all your comments, favorites, and alerts. Or whatever you call it when somebody has put your story on alert. Thank you!**


	11. An Air of Mystery

**Last chapter! It came on kind of quickly, but I think I'm done! Thank you so much to all the people who left reviews, and everyone who added this and/or me to their alerts or favorites. And as always, let me know in the comments what you think!**

And Christmas came. It was a foggy memory in Rachel's brain already. There was the explosion of presents, then the enormous dinner that managed to stress her mother out even though there was nobody eating with them. Rachel's father finally managed to calm her down by taking over the cooking, and Rachel breathed a sigh of relief as he did—her mother's cooking tended to be less than stellar.

They ate roast beef, but though it tasted wonderful, it didn't taste much like roast beef, and Rachel's father refused to disclose his seasoning secrets. There was cranberry sauce, which also had a funny taste to it, as well as a wide variety of vegetables with specks of dark, unidentifiable spices on them. Rachel marveled at how her father used the same dishes that they used every year, but somehow managed to make the meal taste absolutely nothing like Christmas dinner.

After dinner, her mother decided that the three of them alone in the house was gloomy, and instead of inviting someone over—which Rachel thought was the logical place to go, from that reasoning, even if nobody would have come on Christmas—she decided that Christmas music was the logical solution.

"No…" Rachel's father moaned as "Santa Baby" came on. "Change the song," he whispered conspiratorially to Rachel. Rachel did, and a choral version of "Joy to the World" replaced it.

"Did you just recruit our daughter?" Rachel's mother's back was turned.

"How did you—" Rachel began.

"Yes," he said. "Which means I win, unequivocally, forever and ever, no tagbacks."

"I _like _that song," her mother muttered petulantly.

And now they were sitting in the wreckage of the Christmas explosion the morning after. There were scraps of colored wrapping paper all over the floor, and one of the older strands of lights on the tree had gone out. The angel at the top of the tree, made by five-year-old Rachel at Sunday school (when her mother had run completely out of childcare options), was looking distinctly lopsided.

Rachel's mother had pulled them both up to clean the house, because apparently that was a time-sensitive activity or else they would "lose their momentum", but there had been no momentum to begin with. Nothing much had gotten done, and they were all sitting languidly in the living room. Rachel was playing absentmindedly with her new cell phone, her mother was reading a book, and her father was compensating for his handheld game system's broken speakers with aggressive sound effects. Eventually, her mother stood up to go clean up the kitchen, and it was just Rachel and her father sitting there.

"Dad?" Rachel said suddenly.

"What?" asked her father, breaking off of his sound effects but still pressing buttons forcefully.

"How often—you know, when you solve a case—how often is it genetic?"

He paused his video game and looked up. "I know why you're asking."

"So what? Just answer, please."

"No."

"Why not?" Rachel put her phone away for fear that she might break it in frustration.

"Because you're asking the wrong question."

"It's just a question!" She almost stomped her foot. "It can't be right or wrong." 

"It's wrong," he assured her.

Rachel rolled her eyes. "So what's the right question?"

"The right question is"—he put on a revolting, sappy kind of face—"'Do you really love me, Daddy?'"

"What—but—" Rachel blustered and tried to cover for herself. "That doesn't even have anything to _do _with—"

"It's what you've been trying to ask me for months now. You did ask me, and I didn't answer right."

He had lost his sarcasm, he had lost his bravado, and all of a sudden he was just a man—just like anybody else's father, sitting there in his big gray chair.

"You want to ask Lisa, too, but you won't." He took a slow breath and said, "She loves you more than she loves me—more than she loves anything." He looked her in the eye. "And—you asked me if I wished you were really my daughter." He took another breath, and Rachel thought suddenly that he seemed almost self-conscious. "I love you more this way."

Rachel closed her eyes and let the words echo in her head. _I love you more this way. _When the words had sunk in, she stood up, slowly, and went over to his chair. She sat down on his lap, careful not to put any weight on his bad leg, and hugged him.

For a moment it seemed like he didn't know what to do, but then his arms found their way around her back.

"I love you more this way, too," she giggled into his ear, but they both knew that she didn't mean it in a particularly giggly way. She accepted him, more completely and purely than anyone ever had. "I like the cane, too," she added. "It makes you look mysterious." And she grinned.

"Why, thank you," he said, in a snobbish accent. "I do endeavor to cultivate an air of mystery."


End file.
